Network Control System Applications for Manager Decision-Making
Michael James Lees · 2022 American Control Conference (ACC) · 2022
Many categories of manager decision-making (human organisations, environmental systems, supply chains) are in some way or another related to systems. However, system dynamics do not always lend themselves well to superficial, or intuitive, interpretation. This can inadvertently result in suboptimal managerial decision-making. The application of control science concepts for guiding managerial decision-making has the potential to improve results. The contemporary manager is typically resource-constrained and time-stressed. Control-science-based decision-making guidance that does not accommodate the reality of the manager’s time constraints may have limited affect in practice. A manager’s attention-scheduling behaviour is more analogous to that of a networked control system (NCS) than to that of a singularly focused control loop.There is an opportunity to apply NCS aspects of control science to identify the minimum attention/frequency requirements of key decision-making realms. This paper acknowledges the time-poor reality of the contemporary manager. It considers how learnings from NCS theory can be applied to add resilience and efficiency to control-science-inspired improvements to manager decision-making. Just as regulatory control systems don’t perform well when subjected to unexpected network or input/output delays, the application of control theory concepts to manager decision-making will be challenged if the time-poor aspects of the manager are not catered for.